I once subscribed to the idea that your favorite music was supposed to be the type of music you could listen to over and over again because it was, well, your favorite. In the dazzling light of the trail blazed by Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago, I'm not sure I can hold on to that anymore. The simple truth is that I can't listen to this over and over again. There's just something about having your heartstrings pulled across every galaxy of emotion that begs for moderation - and that's exactly what this record represents: an intimacy carved into the deepest confines of the soul, skipping with bounds and strides across ears and into the chest with piercing clarity. And it hurts, a brilliant hurt. But maybe now I can subscribe to a new adage: that it's the pain that reminds us that we're all really alive in the first place.

Mew's biggest problem has simply been that they've been called, well... Mew. Maybe they realized this after the fact and have been striving to make up for it since, because following from the explosive brilliance of Frengers, Mew have threatened to become one of indie rock's most breathtakingly refreshing and innovative bands to ever press a record. While it's been almost four years since their last attempt, here on No More Stories Are Told, I'm Sorry, They Washed Away this Danish collective clearly haven't lost any of their steam, following through with a knockout punch of devastating beauty. With its rapturous mix of artfully composed progressive rock swirling amongst a thicket of richly textured shoegaze and dreampop inspired melodies, Mew have managed to redefine the musical landscape of 2009 with a single magisterial sweep. Drawing on Jonas Bjerre's delicately misty vocals and a haze of shimmering guitar lines, songs like the tension-racked rock out of "Repeater Beater" and the stunningly evocative "Cartoons and Macreme Wounds" never lose sight of Mew's ability to bring together both subtlety and intensity with immaculate ease. Did I mention that "Sometimes Life Isn't Easy" may just be most uplifting and heartfelt song ever written? For anyone who ever thought Minus The Bear had the monopoly on intricate but soulful indie rock, Mew have got a thing or two to say - and it's about time to sit up and listen.

This album absolutely pulses with gut wrenching beauty - Blasko's hauntingly vulnerable vocal performance is only matched by the immensity of her songwriting skills and the freshness she brings to a pop scene on defibrillators. For fans of singer/songwriters everywhere, this release is up there among the best of the year.

Nothing Lasts hey? Oh, but I'll tell you what does: the divine bloody brilliance of Simon Posford and Raja Ram. If Shpongle weren't already the most forward thinking and boundary shattering act on the electronic compass, the duo's latest, Ineffable Mysteries From Shpongleland would be as much of an album as it would be a veritable psychoelectromagnetic nuclear device. Hell, this isn't an album any more than Alice In Wonderland is a story - where Alice had her madly grinning Cheshire Cat, Shpongle have the Goa warped landscape of "Electroplasm"; where the bottle said 'drink me', Shpongle provide their own journey though wild-eyed explorations of acoustic tinged flamenco solos, dub riddled basslines and the most wicked effort at beat stringing ever on "Shpongolese Spoken Here".

In fact, I suspect it would take no less than the psydripped rave of "Ineffable Mysteries" (complete with woodwind straight from the Andes), to convince Shiva the Destroyer to take a holiday from her macabre life of death to indulge in a night of full moon partying down at whichever mystic beach she'd choose. But the kicker? When Benn Jordan gets out-Flashbulb'd by "Nothing Is Something Worth Doing" - A track that stretches Shpongle's template of earthy percussion and electronic wrangling to the edges of the sonic horizon, obscured by the vorpal rays of trance gripped experimentation. And no, by the way, there's no rhyme or reason here, not in this place, this dimension, not where Comic Gods and Carrolleqse absurdity dwell in Unsane harmony, but I'll stand by my Brahman and bask in this light, oh gods, what light.

"Hey ma hey ma hey ma! - look what I can do with a guitar!!!" is more or less the sentiment Adebisi Shank give off here on their insane debut. Far from fret blazing wankery though, the Shanks write their music with one foot in a puddle of math rock and the other in a bucket of fun, all while jumping up and down with frantic energy. With most of the songs here barely scratching the three-minute mark, This is literally packed so tight with awesomeness that its spewing from the seams.

Holy shit. The last album that had me on the edge of my seat like this was something out of pg.99's discography, and even then this is a ride like no other. Short, fast, brutal and passionate - everything Ampere ever had in them, distilled into the best 13 minutes of the year.

If punk rock had itself a barmy, mad professor to call its own, Bomb The Music Industry!s Jeff Rosenstock would be at the very top of the list of candidates. Taking a spin through Scrambles, it'd be easy enough to see him laughing maniacally around the album's wicked brew of attitude-fueled, messily composed DIY punk. While there's very little of what would be called a formula (Scrambles is far too interesting and varied to pin it down to any one recipe book, especially the loose "folk-punk" label the band is associated with), Rosenstock and co. assemble an alchemical mix of ingredients including a whirlwind set of piano driven backroom rockers, furious acoustic tirades and quirky but hard-edged forays of introspection all rolled into one. And as usual, sitting centre stage among it all is Rosenstock's biting lyrical scalpel, his powerful delivery underscored by the force of his playful irony, conjuring enough empathy to pluck ever so softly at the emotions while remaining irresistibly, absolutely and undeniably fun at the same time. And to top it all off? Well, the band is giving Scrambles away absolutely free online. Could you really ask for any more?

I realize that I'm going to lose a lot of indie points for this, but I'm too busy elegantly disheveling my hair to give a damn. Trailing on the bookends of the electrokidz craze of '07, Crystal Castles had just about everything going against them. If the gimmicky 8 bit gameboy samples didn't make this an album already marked for the bin of quick love, NME pretty much sounded the band's death knell by naming Alice Glass the coolest person of '08. And besides, nurave electro is sooo 2007. But I told you - I don't give a damn. There's more fun here than you'll find on a string of glowstick parties and more than enough surprises - from the manic "Xxzxcuzx Me" to the electropop of "Good Time" - to keep it interesting for a while to come.

Okay so the whole time I'm listening to this, I'm imagining Sharon Stone (circa Sliver) walking up to me real slow like, in this awesome black leotard, real skimpy like, and they're these candles (red), burning, and rose petals too. We're in a hotel room, by the way. So like, I'm sitting on a chair and she comes up to me, climbs on top and wraps those long, 80s sex goddess legs are around me, and shes sorta dry humping me, real passionate like, and then I reach down and start to unzip the leotard from behind, and she stops me, looks me in the eye real seductive like, and starts to like make out with my neck and oh my god I jizzed my pants.

Ok, this is just ridiculous now, no band should be allowed to be this consistently awesome. Usually this is the bit where I rant about how saturated the post rock scene is, but Do Make Say Think's brand of jazz infused instrumental jams are so strikingly unique it's hard to even consider mentioning the band and the genre in the same breath for fear of lumping them in with 'everyone else'. While Other Truths isn't the band's most polished record, there's a distinct feeling here that 'polished' isn't exactly the point - with just four songs averaging about ten minutes each, Other Truths plays itself out as one giant, magical studio jam that just so happily got captured on tape. That they just also happen to all sound immaculately composed and free flowing at the same time is only a testament to the wonder of this Canadian collective. Oh, and "Do" just might be the greatest thing these guys have ever written. Get. Now. Feel. Good.

If you're after the perfect album for a teenage summer, then there's not much better you could do than All I Have To Offer... Brimming with an energy untarnished by anything less than a rollicking set of feel-good pop punk anthems, Fireworks make it their sole mission to drag kids kicking and screaming out from whichever dark, angry hole they've dug themselves and into the sunlight of their wistful playground of emotionally aggressive fun. Infused with a hardcore ethos drawn from fellow bands like Set Your Goals and Four Year Strong, what is on offer here, title aside, is a slew of wispy, bouncing guitar lines that flail playfully around David Mackinder's poignantly innocent lyrics. There's a certain nostalgia here too, but only just enough to make All I Have To Offer... the album you'll look back on and say 'hey, now that - that was a good time' with a tinge of heartfelt warmth and memory. While it may not be on the cutting edge of the scene, with its constant tsunamis of catchy, Yeti-sized chorus and way-above-the-standard songwriting, its one of the most gloriously infectious albums to creep up from the sidelines of '09 - and to do anything but revel in its light would be a crime against all that is awesome.

This one shut them allll up didn't it? No more pretty boy here, Mayer delves staright into his raw roots of aqua blues, playing like the best of them and using his soothing but oh-so-dirty voice to give us one of the purest and punchy records of his career. This was the album Mayer simply had to have - from him to us, a breath of awesomeness.

Man, how's this for a step up? While The Floodlight Collective was a decent bunch of fuzzy wuzzy tunes, Spooky Action At A Distance takes the haze of the the previous album and puts it into sharp, diamond-sparkle relief: the melodies are better defined, the vocals more engaging, and the songwriting just miles beyond. Everything is just fucking better. With gems like these, any day now, it's going to be Deerhunter that's going to labeled the 'side-project'. And that's just fine.

Parades, like their name, know how to celebrate in style. I'm thinking dinner jacket, skinny black tie and a pair of blue jeans. You know the one. A little sharp, a lot cool. And when you've released a debut as clean and crisp as Foreign Tapes, there's every reason in the world to party: drawing from constellation of biting post-punk, warm indie-pop and a dash of honey sickle post-rock, if the sheer amount of hyphenating didn't give it away, Foreign Tapes stands on the razor's edge of the musical universe, redefining and breaking out of every little box on the display shelf. How else to explain the way the record delicately threads a line between crystalline sharpness and gorgeous, cascading layers of harmony? Or the way songs like Lung Full Of Light sway with an easy breeze while hitting like a ton of bricks? Or the soothing warmth of the Marigold's thundering climax? Foreign Tapes isn't just a party, but a lesson in how to throw one: new without being weird, innovative without being overbearingly eclectic - in a word, the most refreshing album of 2010.

A good friend described this album as the sound of Barry Manilow in 2008. He has a point. See, The Renaissance is smoother than the skin I'd be rubbing honey into as I undressed her in the dim lights of my pad and just about as cool as the club I picked her up from. After all, when you've gone so far from gangsta to have Norah Jones on guest vocals you may as well be compared to Barry Manilow. My sexytime music of '08.

At first glance, Visiter seems to be just there, its brand of breezy folk lying naked in the open with all on display. From Meric Long's seemingly frank, no-frills delivery to Logan Kroeber's "rainfall of rocks" percussion style, Visiter's unfaltering solidness makes it a strange offering in a genre so usually bound to intimacy. But it compels the listener to weave in and out of Visiter's musical tapestry, letting the songs fall around in the spaces in between. And when, as so often happens, the occasional musical idea strikes, it strikes deep, as beautiful lyrics swim over frenzied percussion and hurried, twangy guitar lines. And that, of course, is Visiter's strength- it's an album so at ease with itself that it's hard not to be taken into the folds of its fatherly arms: serious, but in the end, always there for you.

There's this drinking game we used to play in high school that went something like this: Someone started out by screaming at the top of his lungs: "FINGERS IN THE MIDDLE!", to which everyone screamed it right back. This was followed by "FIDDLE WITH MY DIDDLE!!". Scream back. And then altogether: "OOOHHH FUCK ME YOU FAT BITCH!" and someone would open up with something like "Alex fuck Alex fuck how about a Downer fuck!". Downer would follow with the same, only with someone else's name instead of his. This would go around the party and get faster and faster and faster until someone eventually messed up and scoff something like "Alex fu- shi- go- ahhghghhgdfgdf DAMMIT" and down whatever they had left of their drink, no matter how full it was. Of course we had to make sure of it by chanting "DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!" every ugly gulp of the way. You've probably done that part before. Anyway, not only was this probably the best drinking game ever, but it's messy as fuck. And usually, even before the games got underway, some idiot somewhere would scream out "LETS GET FUCKIN' NAKED!!!" which was how we knew the party had really started.

Face it, the only reason you liked Coldplay was to show your 'sensitive side' to help you get into the pants of that smokin' indie chick you never quite ended up hooking up with. "You know how I know you're gay?" - Yeah. Well, Viva La Vida showed everyone up didn't it? With Brian Eno on the production decks, Coldplay threw open their sound to capture a rocky edge that shot them into the untouchable realm of being liked that the smokin' preppy chick - now even the indie guys have a chance with them, if of course they aren't too busy being apathetically cool. And why not? With music this good, flourishing love can only be a good thing.

Following the vein of the heavy electrodub explosion that took place all throughout the year, Meat Beat Manifesto serve up an offering of grinding dub, ten ton bass drops and the occasional funk-to-the-max break. While it's not a combination that screams with originality - The Bug's London Zoo will make good company for Autoimmune - Meat Beat pull it off with damn fine precision. Be prepared though - for all of Autoimmune's delicate crafting, this is heavy, heavy s'hit that'll bang out from your speakers like a ton of raging bricks.

So come the 'saviours of modern metal' with their second studio release and, well, while the odd few would go so far as to coin a whole other genre of 'whalecore' (oh yes really) on account of it's awsomeness, the truth is, this just another run of the mill, albeit solid, metal record. So Dailor can drum pretty well, and Kelliher and Hinds can harmonize like choir boys on guitar and Sanders ain't no slouch either I suppose. But that's it. There's nothing new to hear here, but I suppose these nothing old either. Moving along....

Here is what you need to know about Sufjan Stevens. He lives in a room. This room has no windows, but it is a magic room. It responds to Sufjan's every thought, warping and twisting with every leap of Sufjan's wild imagination. But the real magic is that this is also a musical room - every twist a note, every warp a harmony. This all sounds pretty awesome, but the downside is that poor Sufjan is stuck in this bloody room. He hasn't seen daylight for years, which means he has to conjure it all in the form of music. And let's give the man credit where credit is due: his imagination is wild, colorful as the brightest day and vivid as the greatest portraits could ever convey. But he has also lost grip on reality. Just... gone, completely: it's a windlowless room. Which means that every ray of gorgeous musical sun is refracted through a prism of unfocused spectral madness, sweeping - left, right, everywhere - but no where in particular. If you alive back then, you'd have seen this same thing before, except that time, the man in question was Dustin Hoffman, and the movie was, well, Rain Man.